March 21, 2014

Ideology

“Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically...They don’t permit a lot of complexity in their thinking. They pull threads together from very weak evidence and draw grand conclusions from them. They’re ironically very predictable from week to week.” This predictability, he says, is owed to their “very strong ideological priors,” which prevent them from “evaluating the data as it comes in [and] doing a lot of [original] thinking. They’re just spitting out the same column every week.”

Excerpted from the New Republic, and checked with NYMag
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117068/nate-silvers-fivethirtyeight-emptiness-data-journalism
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/nate-silver-interview-fivethirtyeight-espn.html
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